


Das Lied Vom Tod

by icarus_chained



Category: Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms, German Mythology, Kinder- und Hausmärchen | Grimm's Fairy Tales
Genre: Acceptance, Amnesia, Curiosity, Death, Despair, Existential Angst, Folklore, Gen, Grim Reapers, Longing, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Prompt Fic, Self-Discovery, Skeletons, resignation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-06
Updated: 2015-07-06
Packaged: 2018-04-08 01:19:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4285239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarus_chained/pseuds/icarus_chained
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Death comes from life, and bones come from bodies, but Death cannot remember if he was ever alive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Das Lied Vom Tod

**Author's Note:**

> _Geh, wilder Knochenmann!_  
>  (Go, fierce man of bones!)  
>  _Ich bin noch jung! Geh, lieber,_  
>  (I am still young! Go, rather,)  
>  _Und rühre mich nicht an._  
>  (And do not touch me.)  
> \--- Der Tod und Das Mädchen, Mathias Claudius
> 
> "But when he blew through it for the first time, to his great astonishment, the bone began of its own accord to sing."  
> \--- The Singing Bone, the Brothers Grimm

Was he ever young? He wonders sometimes. Death comes from life, and bones from bodies. Did his bones ever bear flesh? Was he ever fair of face and bright of hair? Did he ever bear a rosy blush or touch soft petals to softer cheek? Whence came he, this man of bones?

He heard a story once. A fairytale, told to warn the wicked that what lies buried might yet rise again to sing old horrors to new ears. A murdered man, buried beneath a bridge, had offered up a fingerbone for a shepherd's flute, and when played had sung his brother's crimes for all to hear. Only a bone, nothing more. A bone for a flute, and all was laid bare. Sometimes Death remembers that story. Sometimes he wonders if such magic might be real. He has bones aplenty to offer, if little else. He wonders, now and then, if there might exist some musician somewhere to take one from him, to carve a flute and play his history from it. He wonders if there might still exist some magic to sing Death's story to new ears. 

And old ones, too. Ones that had long forgotten it. A skull that could not remember if it had ever worn a face.

It's a foolish thought, perhaps. An idle fancy, from a creature not much prone to them. What care he, or any, what might once have been? It could not matter now. That man, if man he'd been, was dead long aeons and passed beyond all care. Whatever face he might have worn, no-one would see it now upon this grim visage. They do not look to Death for fairness, nor to bone for a tender touch. He is what he is, and what he was means naught.

Yet he remembers, sometimes. He remembers a murdered man beneath a bridge, and a snow-white bone in a shepherd's hand. He remembers the story of a song. 

And sometimes, when he remembers that, he finds a skeletal hand raised to a skeletal face. He finds a fingerbone touched gently between pearly teeth, as if he had breath to play it with. He feels an ache in the cage of hollow ribs, and a welling behind bony orbits, as if he had eyes to weep. He mourns, as someone who knows death full well, for someone who may never have died. He mourns for songs he cannot play, and stories he can no longer remember. Who was Death, when Death once lived, if ever Death lived at all? 

It doesn't matter. Perhaps it never did. Death is Death, and Death comes to all. If Death once died, it only means that Death, in the end, is no different from all the rest.

And in its way, perhaps, that is something of a comforting thought.


End file.
